Then imagine if HN comments could only be 280 characters. And instead of seeing all the branches of the conversation tree, ordered by the vote count of the parent node, you instead saw a random subset of them, chosen on the basis of what Twitter thinks will optimise engagement for your specific account. Once you finish your assigned selection of replies, you're not able to see – hell, you're not even able to elect to be shown – the rest of the thread.

Instead, you're shown more tweets Twitter chooses for you, except this time unrelated ones, such that I recently followed a link to a Brendan Eich tweet about JavaScript and ended up being shepherded to the latest and greatest anti-vax thought leaders, in keeping with his current political leanings: https://imgur.com/a/755aOwI

I'm not going to make any grand claims about it being 'toxic' or 'destroying democracy', or how it ought to be banned, or about tHe AlGOrIthMs, or any of that. I'm just going to say that it's an extraordinarily, exasperatingly stilted way of structuring a conversation. And I'm mystified by that, given the size and success of Twitter, and the relative ease of just showing you the straight conversation like HN does. Hell, if they did that, I wouldn't even care about the character limit.</rant>